How to scrape, using LWP and a regex, the date argument to a javascript function?

Question

I\'m having difficulty scraping dates from a specific web page because the date is apparently an argument passed to a javascript function. I have in the past written a few simpl

Answer 1

Why do you have two whitespace characters in your pattern?

$content =~ s/.*dateFormat\('(\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}\s{2})'\);.*/$1/;
                                                 ^^^^^

they are not in your format example 'dateFormat('2012/02/07')'

I would say this is the reason why your pattern does not match.

Capture all dates

You can simply get all matches into an array like this

( my @Result ) = $content =~ /(?<=dateFormat\(')\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}(?='\))/g;

(?<=dateFormat\(') is a positive lookbehind assertion that ensures that there is dateFormat\(' before your date pattern (but this is not included in your match)

(?='\)) is a positive lookahead assertion that ensures that there is '\) after the pattern

The g modifier let your pattern search for all matches in the string.